Forty Rooms

by Olga Grushin

  “Noble callings, divine standards, creation with a capital C . . . All you ever do is talk in absolutes and abstractions.” I spoke sharply. “Don’t they say God is in the details? I want—no, I need—to experience the details, don’t you understand—the particular, gritty, wonderful details of life out there. The smell of dew and garbage trucks at dawn. The bracing taste of bitter coffee at the chipped counter of a roadside diner. The wild thrill of jazz spilling out of a basement window into a still, dark alley. These are the kinds of things I want to pin down in my poems. Things and feelings that will be unique to the here and now. Things and feelings that will be unique to me in the here and now.”

  All at once conscious of shouting, I stopped. The hush in the drafty room grew hollow like the inside of a tolling bell.

  When he spoke, the indifference of his drawl was a punch to the stomach.

  “Sometimes, my dear, I forget what a child you still are. Oh well. Take care, while out browsing, that you don’t get lost in the stacks. I will be leaving you now.”

  He sounded remote, as if already walking away to some other place, growing more distant with every word. The memories of my last days with Hamlet overtook me with unexpected violence, as they had not for months—that shrugging gesture of his, that condescending half-smile, the pale, bored eyes sliding past me obliquely . . .

  I felt desolate once again, and bright with anger.

  “So go, then!” I hissed into the orphaned darkness. “Go! I’m sick of your speeches, and I’m sick of you! Time I outgrew this juvenile little fantasy once and for all—”

  I nearly screamed when his whisper brushed past my ear, so close I could feel the grazing of his hot, dry lips against my temple.

  “If you make me a proper sacrifice, I may answer a prayer or two. Just this once.”

  The unnatural blindness pressed on my eyelids. My throat was tight.

  “What, you want me to slaughter a goat for you?”

  The telephone shrilled in the hush of the room, jolting me out of cramped armchair sleep; I must have dozed off while waiting. I let it ring another time, to steady my voice before answering, but it turned out to be only my roommate Lisa, calling to tell me that she would be staying at Sam’s tonight, but oh, did she have a story for me—

  “Lisa, you know I can’t talk right now,” I interrupted. “It’s Sunday.”

  “Oops, sorry, I forgot!” She hung up.

  Upbeat music was pulsating through the half-open window; Constantine was having another party. I turned on the lamp—night had sneaked past me somehow—and sank back into my armchair, feeling disoriented and upset. An obscure dark presence loomed at the back of my mind, as if something terrible had happened or was about to happen, yet I could not give it a name; I just felt the impending threat of its misery in my bones. I sat still for a minute, then shook my head to dissipate the lingering sogginess of sleep, and, picking up the sheaf of pages by the telephone, read the top one.

  The pale angel whispered, “Hallelujah!”

  But the angel was missing his left wing

  And could fly in loopy circles only,

  Lopsided, tilting as if tipsy to one side.

  Would it prove sufficient to make my parents understand the full force of my determination to devote myself to this—this solitary quest of capturing the formlessness of living in a net of language? I leafed through the pages, plucking a line here, a couplet there, sounding them out in my mind, trying to see them as my parents would, as would a stranger; but the lines refused to coalesce with any cohesion into verses, or verses into poems. The more I read, the more I sensed, with growing horror, that the meaning I heard ringing so clearly within my being had not broken through the husks of dried words—that life was absent from the littering of adolescent sentiments and empty phrases.

  The telephone rang.

  “Moscow for you,” barked the operator’s voice—and then they were there.

  Allo, allo, how are you, we are well, I am well, all is well! All three of us shouted, then stopped at the same time, waiting for someone to start speaking, but no one said anything for a couple of seconds, long enough for me to imagine the thick cable line stretching in the silt of the ocean floor between the continents, overgrown with mollusks, strewn with skeletons of ships, shadows of primordial monsters slithering in the green murk above.

  “So . . . have you read the poems I sent you?”

  “Yes, we have, yes.” Again they were speaking at once. My mother was laughing a little, as she did when embarrassed, saying that she hoped they were not altogether autobiographical, and something about drugs, while my father mumbled indistinctly behind her laughter. My mother stopped laughing, my father cleared his throat. Another monster floated through the murky ocean waters.

  “Well, anyway, composing poetry is part of youth—who doesn’t have a few sonnets hidden in a drawer somewhere?” my father said with finality. “So, have you given more thought to graduate schools? Moscow University has several programs—”

  “About that,” I said. I could feel my face burning with shame. “I thought I’d stay here for a bit longer. Another year or two.”

  I heard my father’s careful breathing, the muffled clutter of my mother dropping something, her receiver perhaps. I waited for the fumbling to subside.

  “Ah, so,” my mother said at last. She sounded very far away now. “Will you be applying to graduate schools in America, then?”

  This would not be the moment to mention that the unfailingly perfect Olga was considering Yale Law School. “No, I just . . . I thought I’d get a job for a bit.”

  “What kind of a job?”

  “Maybe I’ll work at a post office or something. I thought—”

  “But this isn’t serious,” my mother said in an injured tone.

  My father said nothing.

  “I mean, just for a short while. While I research graduate schools.”

  “Well,” my mother said. “Why don’t you sleep on it, and we’ll discuss all the options next week. There isn’t that much time, you’re graduating in two months. This isn’t a practice run, you know, this is the only life you get.”

  My father still said nothing.

  When the line went dead, I looked at the room where I had spent four years’ worth of nights, minus two or three dozen library vigils and one short spring of romps with Hamlet. I looked everything over with care—I wanted to be certain. I moved my eyes over the two side-by-side desks, the schoolgirls’ bunk beds, Lisa’s posters of Klee and Kandinsky on the walls, my modest cluster of mementoes pinned in a corner, a bald spot in the middle where a Cat in the Hat postcard used to be. No, indeed, nothing real could have come of this—a diligent girl playing at being a poet in a public sandbox. My mind made up, I gathered all the pages from the floor, and, stepping over to my desk, proceeded to empty its drawers of more pages, handwritten originals all, some in Russian, some in English.

  I felt quite calm.

  There was a lighter in my pocket, white letters on red spelling “Siberia”; some friend of Constantine’s had brought it from one of Amsterdam’s coffee shops; I had borrowed it weeks before and forgotten to return it. It would not work right away, and the ball of my thumb grew sore with repeated attempts before I managed to cajole a small blue light into wavering being. The sink in the corner was too shallow to hold all the paper at once. A fireplace would have made for a much more poetic scene—and one should always do these sorts of things with style, I thought with bitterness, and dropped the first handful of pages into the sink; The Cycle of Solitude it was, I noticed. I was all done with cycles anyway. The top page blossomed into glowing life, as if the words had burst into flame on their own accord, from the sheer force of some inner fervor. I could not help reading them then, stark black against dazzling gold, quivering with transient beauty, in the moments before they disintegrated into dampened ash and d
isappeared down the drain half stopped up with clumps of Lisa’s long blond hair.

  In the darkness of an autumn night

  I imagine golden beehives of a fireplace

  Where the embers’ honey slowly ripens

  And a cat is snoring by the flames.

  And I am, once more, my own grandmother,

  I am knitting an eternal scarf,

  And my life is pasted in an album

  In a row of brown old-fashioned photos.

  As I knit the scarf, for my granddaughter,

  In the resonance of solemn hours—

  It could not be me

  Who is awakened

  By my own moan,

  By the remembrance

  Of your lips.

  The page below lay revealed, writhing in turn, new lines flaring up with brief farewell heat. Not wanting to see any more, I dumped the rest of the papers in at once, and their dead white weight poured into the small grimy sink like cement. Nothing happened for a full minute; then smoke began to curl lazily at the edges. From the mirror above the sink, I was observed by an unfamiliar girl with a determined dash for a mouth, her gaze not bitter but lit up with a ferocious joy. I found myself hiccuping with sobs that sounded like laughter, or else laughter that sounded like sobs. There you go, Apollo, a nice little sacrifice for you—the sum of my entire existence to this day, all erased, so I can start anew, so I can create something real, something alive. There, there, can you smell the sweet rot of toy words, of dead words, rising like cloying incense to your heaven? And if I believed in you, and if I could pray, what would I ask in return? To be granted the strength to persevere, first and foremost—not to swerve from my path, not to lose my desire to capture the world bit by bit, word by word, until, in the fullness of time, my small words would number so many they would become a door opened into life as I had known it—opened to anyone who would accept my invitation to walk through. And maybe, lowering my voice to an embarrassed whisper, I would ask to meet someone new—someone I could love fully and forever, my soul mate, my missing half, if I believed in such things. And oh, I would ask you to punish the man who humiliated me so easily, in passing—you would likely find this request the most pleasing of all, for are not the gods ever thirsty for vengeance? But one should be wary of wishes fulfilled and prayers miscarried . . . And as the pages smoked and flared and crumbled away, I wondered at the savage-eyed girl in the mirror, then forgot all about her, thinking of a poem I would start as soon as this tedious rigmarole was over. God’s Book of Complaints and Suggestions, I would call it; it would be a polyphony of prayers, curses, and regrets, layered and contradictory as life, bits of it tragic, bits of it funny, bits of it violent, bits of it—

  The fire alarm blew up above my head.

  Without thinking, I turned on the water, and the room vanished in a hissing cloud of acrid steam. The alarm screamed and screamed. My door was flung open, someone ran in, and, coughing, I watched him pull up the armchair, climb to the ceiling, and unscrew something with manly efficiency.

  The noise stopped.

  “That’s better,” he said, stepping down. “Lucky I was passing by. What on earth were you doing?”

  “Destroying compromising materials,” I said.

  “I understand,” he said. “Dirty photographs.” His tone was weighty with mock seriousness, and his eyes alight with laughter in his face.

  “I wish,” I said. “My life is nowhere near that interesting.”

  “Burning down the dorm seems interesting enough to me,” he said. “I’m on my way to a party.”

  “Constantine’s?”

  He nodded.

  “Watch out for the ouzo, it’s deadly.”

  He pushed the armchair back to the wall.

  “You should air out the room properly. Need help cleaning up?”

  I turned and considered the sink, choked with soggy gray paper. A charred, half-drowned shred was plastered against the enamel, a few lines still legible.

  You can escape this maze if you grow old in it first.

  The windows here are transparent walls,

  Your fingers stick with the blood of childhood games,

  And Ariadne’s thread is a ball of chewed gum . . .

  I became aware of his standing next to me, looking at the corpse of the poem, and flushed, and smeared it quickly into wet soot, and hid my blackened hands behind my back.

  It had just occurred to me that I remembered every last word of my vanished poems by heart.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Thanks.”

  Our eyes met. His face had the broad, clean planes of a Michelangelo nude, and his hair was the boyish, curly mop of a Raphael angel. His eyes were no longer laughing.

  “Well, I’ll be going, then,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Thanks.”

  Still he stood there.

  10. Studio Room

  Conversation in the Dark at the Age of Twenty-two

  Happiness this deep is wordless.

  11. Bathroom

  A Poem Written at the Age of Twenty-three

  I sat on the mattress, my sweater wrapped tightly around me, my arms wrapped around my knees. I felt chilled to the bone. Adam freed a shirt from its hanger, tossed it into the open suitcase, and threw the hanger onto a growing pile; plastic hit plastic with a dry, loud clap. He would not look at me. Through the basement’s two small street-level windows I watched the rain battering dark winter puddles. A woman’s shoes rapped past, sharp and reptilian. I made another effort to speak, though my words felt like ghostly wisps of real words, passing right through him, helpless to change anything.

  “Please understand. I followed you up here because of your school, and now you want me to follow you across the ocean because of your job, and I just . . .”

  Another hanger smashed into the pile with an angry clatter.

  “Please. I don’t want to leave you. Maybe later . . . when you get back . . .”

  He looked at me at last. His eyes were dark and flat.

  “We were going to spend our lives together.” I could see the jaws clenching in his face. “Now, at the very last minute, I find out that you went behind my back to extend the lease on this dump, and you tell me you won’t be coming.”

  “Please. Please listen . . . I just . . .”

  “No,” he said, turning away. “I will finish packing and go. I will stay somewhere else tonight. I don’t know where. A hotel. I will go to the airport directly from there.” I tried to interrupt. “No,” he said again, and the force of it was like a hand clamped over my mouth. “I don’t want to say things I’ll regret later. I’ll call you from the hotel. If you change your mind, pack and join me. Otherwise—otherwise we’ll work out the details later, and I wish you well.”

  Stunned, I listened to the skeletal clacking of the hangers for another minute, then stood up and, without looking at him, walked into the bathroom and shut the door behind me; there was nowhere else to hide from each other in our cramped closet of a place, and, like a frightened child, I needed to close my eyes so I would become invisible to the horrible monster stalking me through the basement. But the monster got me here just as well. He had already taken his toothbrush and his razor, but in the corner of the bathtub a giant gladiolus leaned against the moldy tiles, its wilting petals stuck out like red tongues from its many maws, mocking me, mocking me.

  (“By the time it dies,” Adam had said when he had brought it home a week before, “you and I will be strolling along the Seine.”

  “But we don’t have a vase large enough,” I had protested. “Come to think of it, we don’t have any vases at all.”

  “So let’s put it in the bathtub. It’ll make for some interesting showers.”

  “Do you know, I haven’t seen one of these in years,” I had said. “I remember carrying a bouquet of gladioli on my
very first day of school. I was seven, and the flowers were taller than me, and— You’re not listening.”

  “I am,” he had said, but I could see that he was thinking about his music again, so I had stopped talking and he had not noticed.)

  Crumpling onto the floor by the radiator, I pressed my forehead to the wall, tried to drown out the unbearable clash of the hangers. After a while the noise stopped, all was quiet for some time; then the rip of the suitcase zipper gashed my hearing, and his steps crossed the room—it took only four of his strides to reach the door from the bed.

  The front door opened and closed.

  Frozen with disbelief, I listened for the turning of the key. But the door flew open instead, his steps tumbled back in, and he burst into the bathroom and kneeled beside me, cupping my face between his hands in just that way he had, and his eyes were no longer dead, and as always, as ever with him, I was overtaken by the warm rush, and everything within me fell into its proper place.

  “I can’t leave like this. Tell me. Do you no longer love me?”

  “I love you more than I ever thought possible. More than you’ll ever know.”

  “Then why are you doing this?”

  “Do you remember the first night we spent together, I asked you whether you would prefer to be happy in this life or immortal after your death, and you said immortal, and I said I was the same, and we marveled at the serendipity of having found each other? Except I fell in love with you, and when I’m with you now, I just want to be happy. That is, I am happy, deliriously, astonishingly happy, but I’m also terrified of losing that happiness, and wondering whether you’re happy enough with me, and trying to make you happy, and worrying whether I’m really as happy as I seem to be or whether I’m just fooling myself into believing I’m happy because I don’t want to admit that I’m also a little sad and a little lost, and with all that fretting about happiness, as well as being so exhausted from all the odd jobs I’ve taken to help pay your bills, I barely have the energy for my poetry anymore—but for you, for you it still is all about your music. And what bothers me most is not the knowledge that I need you so much, that I love you more than you love me—although that’s pretty hard to take—but the fact that—”